Keeping Meets safe and fun
In addition to maintaining one’s physical safety, it is important to recognize that the pkTO community and the reputation of parkour is largely reflected by you, the practitioners.
Physical Safety: Learning your Limits
There is one thing that every member of our community has in common with each other. That is, we are constantly exploring the limits of our bodies. However, it is important to realize that often, these limits are difficult to discern until one unknowingly (and possibly unreadily) surpasses them.
There was a recent post on a forum where someone stated that parkour is 99% courage and 1% skill, to which the reply was: it should be the other way around, 99% skill and 1% courage.
As you first to enter the world of parkour and learn that with a little bit of moxie, spunk, grit and or guts, you can do something that you never thought you could, it is easy to think that with a whole lot of courage, anything can be done. This is a bit of a lapse in judgment as one quickly realizes that even with five times your current volume of guts, some things only come with practice and repetition. Ideally, you should never have to psych yourself into doing a movement or have sweaty palms before you leap. In the best case scenario, you have slowly trained your way up to this level and you know your limits so well, that with utter confidence, you complete the movement without any inhibition. As much as we all rely on a hit of adrenaline to get us through the meet, 99% skill and 1% courage is what we should all be working towards. Relying on guts alone to push our limits eventually gets us into trouble with our bodies.
At its most obvious, these gutsy lapses in judgment manifest themselves in different slip-ups and hilarious bails of all sorts. In other more coincidental cases, it’s rolling your ankle on a lawn sprinkler that no one expected to be on the other side of that fence (“look before you leap” applies to us in a more literal sense). But in its sneakiest, most conniving, least obvious form, these lapses in judgment accumulate into terrible repetitive strain injuries. The six-foot drops that feel fine and don’t hurt at the time (How could they? They’re only half the size of the drops in those videos!), add up as the months turn to years. Trust people who tell you that things don’t always have to hurt immediately, to hurt you later on. Ligaments and tendons aren’t like muscles; they don’t like to tell you that something is about to go wrong until they’re just about to blow. Those videos that have introduced 90% of the world to parkour take the very best moments of years of training. If you condensed your whole life into a two minute highlight reel, I bet it would look pretty decent too. Take your time, its good to realize that there are things that you can’t do just yet. It’s great to have the nothing-is-impossible attitude, but that gets you nowhere without a little patience and a lot of elbow grease.
Although learning-from-your-mistakes is often touted as a fail-safe mantra for progress, why make the mistakes if you don’t have to at all? Don’t get me wrong, it is quintessential that lessons are learned from mistakes made, but know your limits; know when to push them, and when to stop. Train safe.
-Chris